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I accidentally issued the following command sudo chmod 000 /home/username/. And now I'm unable to log in. Also when I'm trying from the bash shell, my home folder is appearing as "Access-your-private-data.desktop". Any ideas about how to solve the problem?

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1 Answer

up vote 8 down vote accepted

Try to log in via command line.

Upon login screen, hit ctrl+alt+F1 to switch to console tty and try to log in there with your normal account.

If this is successful you would eventually be able to apply sudo chmod 755 /home/username/

Let us know if this works.

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Hey,It worked.Thank you :) – Rajat Saxena Oct 5 '12 at 9:07
I'm glad to hear! :-) – cauon Oct 5 '12 at 9:10
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If you feel that @cauon answer helped you to fix the issue. Please mark the answer as accepted answer by clicking on the grey tick mark. Thanks. – devav2 Oct 5 '12 at 11:20
@cauon Why sudo? In this situation, the user still owns his/her home folder, it's just the permissions that have changed. So chmod should succeed even when not run as root. – Eliah Kagan Oct 6 '12 at 5:14
@EliahKagan I wasn't sure about this and had no machine to test :-) It was just precaution. – cauon Oct 6 '12 at 10:15

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